History: Mallarmé

Source of version: 1 (current)

See [http://www.studiocleo.com/librarie/mallarme/biography.html. Mallarmé's] task was to make sense of the marginalized status of poetry in his time, as a cultural mission. Notice that he did not choose to contest the mass media on their own ground (although he edited a fashion magazine for awhile; it never mentioned literature) but rather, through an intensive investigation of the nature of poetic language and of that experience which poetic language articulates, to attain the full potential of the linguistic artifices and departures from the vernacular which had become part of poetic tradition since the Alexandrians (epitomized particularly in Vergil's ((Aeneid))), but which had seldom been the chief focus of previous poetic endeavor.